The 14th Lambeth Conference was held at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England from July 16 to August 3, 2008. The exact number of attendants is unknown, since there was no official statement from the Anglican Communion Office regarding the number of attendants during the conference. However, it is estimated that approximately 660 bishops attended this year. This means that approximately 200 bishops did not attend this conference. That figure represents one-quarter of all bishops worldwide; so in that sense, it is no wonder that a question of the legitimacy of this Lambeth Conference has been raised.

However, besides bishops who could not attend the conference because of personal reasons, most of the ones who intentionally did not attend the conference are bishops from the Church of Nigeria, the Church of Uganda and others, including several bishops from England and Australia, and so on. The Church of Nigeria currently has more than 122 bishops and the Church of Uganda has 30 dioceses and at least 30 bishops. Among the 291 bishops who attended the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), an event that is a protest to the policy of the Episcopal Church in the United States, held in Jerusalem just prior to the Lambeth Conference at the suggestion of Archbishop Peter Akinola of the Church of Nigeria, approximately half of the bishops, including the ones from Tanzania and Kenya, also attended the Lambeth Conference and made a meaningful contribution. Furthermore, there was no single province that boycotted at the Primates Meetings, which was held in Alexandria in February 2009. Our Anglican Communion never broke apart. Among other things, we must first affirm this fact.

The discussion at the Lambeth Conference this year was compiled as Notes on Reflection on the Lambeth Conference 2008.Footnote 2 How the Nippon Sei Ko Kai (NSKK), the Anglican Church in Japan, can respond to the discussion at the Lambeth Conference is discussed herein. The following points are quoted from the Notes on Reflections on the Lambeth Conference.

(1) The very name the Anglican Communion tells you something about the expectations of the Anglican family — that they are trying to live out to the fullest possible extent of the fellowship, the communion, that we are brought into by our baptism into Christ.

The NSKK celebrates the 150th anniversary of its missionary beginning this year (2009). The NSKK was established by missionaries from the Episcopal Church in the United Sates of America, including C.M. Williams in 1859, and later other missionaries sent from the Church Missionary Society and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) from England and the Anglican Church of Canada. That is, the NSKK was not engaged by a single group, but four different missionary groups concurrently engaged in mission work. Thus, mission work of the early NSKK was not necessarily conducted in a co-supportive manner. For example, multiple cathedrals initially existed in the Tokyo area. It was not until the first General Synod in 1887 that the NSKK was finally constituted. Consequently, the NSKK was a diverse church where high and low, broad and liberal co-existed from the beginning, which in a way represented the epitome of the Anglican Communion.

What brought the NSKK together as one was the Book of Common Prayer in Japanese and the Lambeth Quadrilateral. The NSKK did not officially adopt the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith. This is quite a contrast to the fact that the Anglican Church in Korea was engaged in mission work solely by the SPG from England. The same Book of Common Prayer is used at every NSKK churches in Japan, but the services vary a great deal. Not only the service but also the views on church organization, ecclesiology and ethical issues vary from one diocese to another. For example, even though the NSKK has revised its canons and officially approves of female clergy as a province, two dioceses have not yet adopted female clergy. However, those two dioceses will not be banished from the province, and bishops in our eleven dioceses regularly meet together in the House of Bishops. It is beyond the NSKK’s comprehension that the unity of Communion cannot be maintained unless the Anglican Covenant is newly established.

(2) In Sections B and C of the Reflections Document, the bishops reflect on the nature of Mission and Evangelism — that what begins with personal conversion and transformation through Jesus Christ spills out into the redemption of all of creation. Christians have to be concerned with justice for individuals and in society, focusing upon the most needy and outcast in our society. They seek to transform the world and to serve the world according to the pattern of Jesus himself. In Section D of the document, the bishops extend this concept of mission even into the area of the care of the environment, a major concern in the life of the world at present, but also part of the stewardship of God’s people for God’s gift of creation.

These sections must be the ones that compel interest for the NSKK as well. In August 1995, the NSKK Conference on Mission opened at the Seisenryō in Kiyosato. This meeting resulted from a resolution at the previous year’s 46th regular General Synod of the NSKK. Looking toward ‘A Church whose life is Christ at work in history, the world, society and the people’, the theme of the conference was ‘The Mission of the NSKK — Our responsibility to History and Outlook on the 21st Century’. At this conference the NSKK confessed with pain and sought forgiveness for its support of the war that led to the invasion of the various countries of Asia. The following year, at its General Synod, the NSKK formally adopted a resolution ‘A Declaration concerning the war responsibility of the NSKK’, which was highly assessed and talked about at the 1998 Lambeth Conference.

The Conference on Mission also announced the following definition of the NSKK’s mission:

This is our missionary goal as the NSKK. It has already been 14 years since the NSKK Conference on Mission was held. We are currently preparing to hold the second Conference on Mission in 2012 to examine if the reality of the mission of the NSKK for the past 14 years has been fully reflecting the above declaration as well as to examine how to carry the mission forward.

At the Lambeth Conference 1998, the NSKK was in charge of hosting the Eucharist for transfiguration of the Lord on August 6. Also, August 6 is the day an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and we prepared a text that connected the transfiguration of Jesus and the meaning of what happened in Hiroshima. We asked Canon Susan Cole-King (she has died in 2001) from the Church of England, whose father was tortured by the Japanese military for serving as a preacher. She delivered a memorable message of reconciliation.

‘A Declaration concerning the war responsibility of the NSKK’ was introduced to all of us at the same time. The main theme of this Eucharist was a confession of the sins as a Church, the restoration of the broken relationship and reconciliation within the Church. Since then, the NSKK has been diligently working on the program to be reconciled especially with the Anglican Church in Korea. At the Lambeth Conference 2008, Archbishop Nathaniel Makoto Uematsu, the Primate of the NSKK, offered a special prayer during the Eucharist hosted by the Anglican Church in Korea. This was to repent for the pain Japan imposed on Korea and to thank the opportunity for peace and reconciliation, nonetheless.

We consider that this confession and reconciliation as the church of the NSKK had a universal significance. One cause of the problems the present Anglican Communion is facing could be the fact that a confession of the sins we committed as the Church in the past has not been seriously done. For example, have the Anglican Churches in Anglo-Saxon countries ever officially confessed to God their sin of treating African people as slaves as a sin of the Church? Unless a serious confession of sins is made by the Church, there may not be a restoration of the broken unity of Communion.

(3) In Sections E and F, the bishops remind us of the wider contexts of our mission; Christianity is not alone as a world faith, and our modern context means that we have to enter into dialogue with other world faiths. This section calls for respectful dialogue. Moreover, Anglicans have always recognized that they belong to a bigger reality which is Christ’s Church, so that ecumenism, or the discovery and development of our common mission from Christ with our sister Churches, east and west, is part and parcel of our faithful response to God. The section reaffirms Anglican commitment to ecumenism.

The Christian population in Japan is less than 1%. It may be said that most Japanese people have a sense of closeness to Buddhism and Shinto. Therefore, it is impossible for us as the NSKK, to think about our mission without considering establishing a dialogue with other faiths. This leads to the movement by the World Conference of Religions for Peace, and we have the dialogues with other religious leaders at various times.

Although the Christian population in Japan is less than 1%, it is said that the influence of Christianity is greater than its number in Japanese society. It is probably mainly due to the presence of schools, hospitals and welfare institutions established by Christian missionaries. As one of the characteristics of Japanese people, what is behind that fact is that there are many writers and thinkers who recognize Christianity as a part of the intellectual culture and express ideas influenced by Christianity, although they have not been baptized. At any rate, we should make further efforts to share the NSKK’s experience in a multiple-religion nation with the other churches of the Anglican Communion.

The ecumenical movement and dialogues among churches in Japan are making significant developments. In particular, the dialogue with the Japan Evangelical Lutheran Church (JELC) deserves a global attention. In order to promote the ecumenical awareness, the first official joint worship service with Eucharist sponsored by the NSKK and JELC was held at St Andrew Church (the Cathedral of the Diocese of Tokyo, NSKK) in the afternoon of Pentecost Sunday, May 11, 2008. More than three hundred believers of Anglican and Lutheran traditions gathered together to attend this historic joint worship service presided by the ministers of the two churches with the worship order specially prepared adopting from the NSKK’s Book of Common Prayer and JELC’s Worship Book.

Dr Tokuzen, former President of the Japan Lutheran Seminary and Prof. Emeritus of Japan Lutheran College, preached, two choirs sang hymns and the Eucharist was presided by Primate Makoto Uematsu of NSKK as the main presider, and Revd Yamanouchi, President of JELC as co-presider. Because the two churches have not reached the agreement of the full communion, the Holy Communion was made possible as a Eucharistic hospitality administered by the Anglican archbishop and distributed by the priests and pastors of both churches.

This worship experience, together with the meeting for the introduction of the two churches and the speech on the significance of this event, was highly appreciated by the attendants in the metropolitan area and later officially recognized as a success. One of the significance of this worship service was that Eucharist was held as a joint Anglican–Lutheran worship, which was not possible at the joint worship service of Lutheran–Roman Catholic churches at the occasion of the publication of the Japanese translation of the Joint Declaration of the Doctrine of Justification in 2004, or the Anglican–Roman Catholic joint worship service to commemorate the publication of Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (Japanese version) in February 2008. This Pentecost event in Tokyo was not a Prayer meeting or a service of the Word, but a worship service of the Word and Eucharist.

(4) In Section H, the difficult questions around the tensions over homosexuality are explored, leading into a reflection on the authority of Scripture in Anglican thinking in Section I. While there is a fairly common view of the authority of Scripture, there is no consensus on the question of homosexuality. Section J addresses the question of the Covenant, offering a cautious welcome; Section K addresses the Windsor Process.

One of the most crucial themes at this Lambeth Conference 2008 is focused on sections H through K above. One vital point is that the bishops who are critical of the movement of the Episcopal Church in the United States, including some bishops in the Episcopal Church, do not accept the ordination and nuptial blessing for the homosexuals, while they basically did not object at this Lambeth Conference to the so-called ‘Listening Process’ — approving the presence of the homosexuals who are also equally God’s children and listening to their stories and giving them consideration — which was confirmed at the Lambeth Conference 1998.

We, the NSKK, would like to strongly endorse this policy. The practice of the ‘Listening Process’, which demands that we need to listen to the experiences and pains of sexual minorities, has been one of the large mission issues at the NSKK as well. Actions such as the ‘Sexual Minority Project’ by the Diocese of Chubu, which aims to liberate sexual minorities, such as homosexuality and individuals affected by gender identity disorder, have already been taken. We have a sexual-minority priest in the NSKK who announced that he was transgender and asked for a gender transition from male to female, which was officially approved by the bishop of that diocese. Even though her presence is not necessarily approved by the entire NSKK, this issue needs to be discussed at a deeper level at the NSKK. It is a prerequisite for realizing reconciliation and unity within the Anglican Communion to fully enforce the ‘Listening Process’ at every level.

That is not to say that there was a complete agreement at this Lambeth Conference on characteristics and the meaning of Anglican Covenant. However, what was emphasized the most was that the concept ‘covenant’ means to ensure the bond of affection and relationship between God and people and neighbors which are denoted in the Scripture, not a simple legal restraining force. The NSKK officially expressed its position regarding the ‘Anglican Covenant’ at an early stage when the Windsor Report 2004 was issued; owning a binding force as in an ‘Anglican Covenant’ does not match the spirit of Anglicanism which values the unity of diversity and autonomy of each province and diocese, and ‘Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral’ is enough for a guideline for the unity of Anglican Identity. Although some provinces, including the NSKK, which attended the Lambeth Conference 2008, share this viewpoint to some extent and even though this is a correct understanding theologically, the NSKK will be compelled to reexamine the concept including the idea ‘this is not the best but the only possible method’ in the future in order to repair the broken relationship within the present Anglican Communion.

At this Lambeth Conference, the functions and positions of the so-called four instruments for the unity of Anglican Communion: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conferences, the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) and the Primates Meetings were reaffirmed. Meanwhile, the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Primates has been massively expanded, a sign of which was observed ubiquitously at this Lambeth Conference. The Archbishop of Canterbury conducted major speeches at the general meeting, the instruction of meditation for three days at the Cathedral, and the preaching at the closing service all by himself. This seems to have raised a clear awareness of the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury as the focus of the unity of Anglican Communion.

The order of the above four instruments is in fact of considerable importance. The Primates Meetings are sometimes placed before the Lambeth Conferences or the ACC in various documents issued in the past few years. The order in the first draft of the Reflections was (1) the Archbishop of Canterbury, (2) the Primates Meetings, (3) the Lambeth Conferences and (4) the ACC. Among these four, the ACC was the only instrument that includes clergy and layperson besides bishops. A number of people pointed out some theological problems on that order as well as from a communal standpoint. As a result, the Primate Meetings was pushed back to the fourth in the order.

The NSKK is a church, which values the principles of the consensus fidelium in the Anglicanism and focuses on the ACC as the center. We support the idea of strengthening the authority of the ACC, for the reconciliation process of Anglican Communion from now on.

The bishop from Tanzania, who was the facilitator of the bible study group that I attended as interpreter for my Japanese bishop, sent clergy in his diocese to every corner of the parish with a bicycle in the right hand and the Scripture in the left hand. So far, over one hundred mission stations have been established. The bishop from Sudan told an unspeakably sad wartime story. He shared with us how the Church kept talking about hope in such despair. A woman bishop from the Episcopal Church told us with tears in her eyes that she was suffering from alcoholism and overcame it, and the Church must be a community that encourages people with such sufferings. We responded ‘Amen’ to each and every word she said.